Drobe Closes Its Doors After Ten Years

Drobe.co.uk, the premier RISC OS news website, today announced that it has entered archive mode and will no longer function as a news reporting source. The site was founded by Peter Price in 1999 and editorship was taken over by journalist Chris Williams in 2001.

“Drobe’s RISC OS news service, which launched in October 1999, will sadly cease from Monday. Running the site has been so much fun over the years and the experience has been very rewarding – from the investigative pieces and tabloid tomfoolery to the libel writ threats and meeting up with users after shows. However, all good things must come to an end – if you’ll forgive the cliche – and it’s time to formally move on.”

Darn. Drobe was an excellent site and it’s painful to see it go. Credit must be given for keeping the content archived and not just deleting everything. Though not personally a RISC OS user (but would love to be), Drobe provided a really accessible face to RISC OS. There are still a number of RISC OS related news sites, particularly notable iconbar.com (named after the task-bar concept RISC OS had long before Windows ever did).

The loss of any major portal is a blow to any niche operating system; it’s hard to imagine a world without BeBits and AmigaWorld. It is important to OSnews to cover niche / aged / alternative operating systems and I hope we can be of assistance to the RISC OS community going forward.

Thank you Peter and Chris for 10 years of dedicated work and I hope the RISC OS platform continues to grow ever stronger.

The days of the older alternative OS’s come to a close some day I supose, still though, there are a lot of good memories and a lot of “oh yeah? well i remember when…” that will never go away. To the dead OS’s of old, we look forward to seeing you again in years to come as OSS clones

The days of the older alternative OS’s come to a close some day I supose, still though, there are a lot of good memories and a lot of “oh yeah? well i remember when…” that will never go away. To the dead OS’s of old, we look forward to seeing you again in years to come as OSS clones

I believe we are already there. Most alternative OS are barely alive or just good memories. We live in a world where the desktop PC runs Windows, Mac OS X or some flavor of Linux.

BeOS is gone, Haiku still have some works to be done before we get a real release, but even then, it’s not going to become a major player.

AmigaOS is well, almost dead, since people can use it on limited hardware (costly) or older upgraded to PPC Amiga. Same with MorphOS.

And the list could go on. But if some are alive, it’s as niche player or nostalgic users still holding on to the good life.

It’s sad really. I miss that time where Windows was not yet the winning standard. The fun I had using OS/2… And TOS on my Atari 1040ST…

At last ARM has decided to try and compete in the low end of the laptop and desktop markets.

So after years and years of running RISCOS on processors that are suitable for music players and disk controllers – it would be really nice to finally see RISCOS run on something resembling a modern desktop class processor.

It’s sad that Drobe has now become static yet still too early for the eulogy.

– Wasn’t OSNews born from the ashes of BeOSNews?

A decade is quite long for any group of enthusiasts to remain together and having fun in a venture.

Hopefully, some of the regular contributors to Drobe have by now developed a satisfaction in writing about events/tecnology surrounding RiscOS and will become regular contributors to OSNews. This would bring some interesting discussions/posts in the future.

Those more inclined to use chips, glue, solder, and other items to put together projects (I still remember the Lego ARM based laptop), will have some challenges in finding an existing forum to express themselves. However, these could become the seed for a gathering of “open-source hardware projects” similar to the extinct NS32532 based PC532. Having open-source hardware is probably the best way in which near-extinct OSes could come back to populate the rest of the world.